Interview with Playwright Johnna Adams

For our upcoming New Playwright Festival, we are ecstatic to be partnering with playwright Johnna Adams to present her incredible new play Gidion’s Knot. Gidion’s Knot offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a conference between a mother and a teacher discussing an 11-year-old boy who is being bullied. A devastating new play that asks, “who is ultimately responsible for the actions of children?”

Johnna Adams is a recent Princess Grace Award recipient. Her play Sans Merci was the 2008-2009 Reva Shiner Award winner, and was produced by the Bloomington Playwrights Project in October of 2008. Johnna’s plays have been read or produced by theatres all over the country, including The Alliance Theatre Lab (Miami, FL), The New Group (New York, NY), and Flux Theatre Ensemble (New York, NY). Learn more about Johnna.

Gidion’s Knot will be directed by our very own Michole Biancosino starring Lisa Velten-Smith and Amy Lynn Stewart on October 11th @ 7:30pm, October 13th @ 8pm, and October 16th @ 3pm. More ticket info.

JB: You have written a lot of plays and worked with a bunch of theaters all over the country. Can you talk a little bit about your journey as a playwright and where you are now in your process as opposed to when you were first starting out?

JA: Every new play, I feel like I am starting out again. It is amazing how many plays you can write and still not feel like you know how to write plays! I have done a lot of crazy things as a playwright- I had a play done in a womens’ prison in Iowa that I got to attend- a cast of mainly murderesses (the director told me they are more stable than the drug addicts who get sent to solitary more often). That was one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen. Some of the actresses were wearing street clothes for the first time in years and they were all able to pretend they were somewhere else for a while in a way that must be close to escape. I also had a play done at a naturist resort convention- where I participated in an all-nude talkback with an all-nude audience (when in Rome , , , ). Other than that, I mainly grew up as a playwright working with a small community of theatres in Orange County, California- storefronts we called them (sort of the word for off-off-theatre in the area, to distiguish the theatres trying to do something more from the ‘community theatres.’ ) STAGEStheatre, Hunger Artists Theatre Ensemble, and the now defunct Rude Guerilla Theatre Company which has sort of become Monkey Wrench Collective all supported my early plays and are still the biggest and most frequent producers of my plays. Even though I have I moved to New York, they keep producing plays I send them- just as if I still lived down the block and was available to stop by and help paint the set. They are the most amazing and supportive people on earth. I would never have been a playwright without them, because I was not an early hotshot writer. My first 6 or so full length plays were awful- but these theatres had patience with me and taught me to write. Now, I am in grad school at Hunter College where Tina Howe and Mark Bly are opening doors for me that I gave up on seeing open for me years ago, and that is exciting. I hope I’ve just begun to get to my good writing phase (the bad and so-so phases lasted too long!)

JB: Gidion’s Knot is a beautiful, multi-layered play, with so much tension built into each moment. How did you begin writing Gidion’s Knot? Was there a specific idea/event that sparked the writing process for you?

JA: I have carried the germ of the idea for Gidion’s Knot around for six or so years. Originally it was going to be a play for three men (instead of two women) and most of what I tried to write was what is now the play’s backstory. I kept meaning to write the parent / teacher conference scene in that early draft but didn’t get to it because of all that backstory I was slugging through. My second semester in grad school, I was struggling to find an idea that I thought Tina Howe would like- and the Gidion’s Knot idea became re-formed around the sort of strong, female-centered plays she writes that I so admire. I got to write it and bring it in scene by scene to class as if I were writing her a valentine and she really liked it. I honestly didn’t think the play was going to be a big hit with anyone else- I thought it was possibly too fraught, too dark, too claustrophic, too something. I am not my own best promoter or cheerleader and have a lifetime of general lack of interest in my plays that tends to support that. But she encouraged me to send it out and now Mark Bly has come on full time with the program and he has been really encouraging me too. I don’t remember a specific idea or event that sparked the play. I was constantly worried when I was a kid that my writings were too dark and I would get in trouble if an adult found them, I remember. Which is probably nonsense- but something I remember being worried about. In my anxiety scenarios around it, I was sure that if I ever were hauled into a principal’s office over some dark bit of writing, my dad would come in and say some of the same things the mother in Gidion’s Knot says- or, defend me for something other people (in the conservative West Texas community we lived in certainly) would have considered indefensible. Also, I was writing this for Tina Howe, who didn’t really like my first semester play, so I think there was a subconscious thing happening about a mother defending a child’s writing that reflected this grad school situation. Although that gives you the idea that Tina’s classroom is some sort of dread horror like the play- but really it’s full of little gifts she brings you, syllabi and exercises printed on gold leaf or artfully carved artisan paper and light and laughter. But all that makes you really want to write well for her, which creates it’s own kind of anxiety.

JB: What are your expectations for the NYNP festival and Gidion’s Knot? What do you hope to see from this workshop production?

JA: I am really excited to see the amazing cast that Michole has put together. Lisa and Amy are two of my favorite actresses on the planet. And I just want to see if the boat floats.

Purchase tickets for Gidion’s Knot